Icy March Storm Leaves Accidents In Its Wake

By Howard Schwach

A car crossing Neponsit Avenue from Beach 130 Street skidded on the icy surface and impacted a truck waiting at the corner for the traffic to pass by. This accident was typical of those late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning.

Police officers on patrol in both the 100 and 101 Precincts were kept busy on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning responding to dozens of minor accidents throughout peninsula in the wake of an icy, fast-moving storm that left little snow but lots of problems.

For most of Wednesday morning, police in both precincts were “pending alert,” which, according to police sources, means that there were not enough patrol units available to handle all of the jobs being dispatched by the NYPD’s central radio.

A van accident under the elevated structure at Beach 98 Street on Tuesday night sent this man to Peninsula Hospital Center for treatment.
Nearly all of the calls were for fender-benders that did not require medical attention, but fewer than a half-dozen required an ambulance to respond.

The majority of accidents occurred at the corners where side streets merged with main roads. In some cases, those areas were sheets of ice from the rain and snow that fell on Tuesday and the freezing temperature overnight.

Several of the accidents took place under the Freeway, as icy conditions pushed cars into the concrete pillars that make up the support for the A Train.

In other cases, cars turning from main roads, most of which were plowed and sanded by the Department of Sanitation, into side roads which were not plowed, found that the car would not turn and often slid into the curb or into parked cars.

One local man whose car was rammed by a sports utility vehicle that could not stop at a corner nearby PS 114 on Beach 135 Street, angrily told The Wave, “People with SUV’s think that they are exempt from the laws of physics. They should understand that their four-wheel drive does not help them stop any better than any other car.”

Police sources say that there were no fatal or near-fatal accidents during that time span.